Why We Drown

It’s later afternoon at the Town Lake YMCA in Austin, Texas, and a man in Lane Two is gliding through the pool with fearless perfection. His movements are languid; breathing metronomic; pace effortless. He completes lap after lap with such ease of motion that the only word that keeps coming to mind as I watch him move down the lane is natural. That’s a natural-born swimmer.

In fact he’s nothing of the sort. No human being is a natural-born swimmer.To confirm, I need only look over to the YMCA’s instructional pool, where the whole notion of being a natural-born swimmer is quickly disabused by a clutch of six physically fit adults milling anxiously in waist-deep water around Dena Garcia, a swim instructor.

They’re participants in a TOW?—“Terrified of Water”—class, and the contrast with what’s happening in Lane Two illustrates something important. At some point in time (probably very early in life), the impossibly elegant lap swimmer had to do exactly what these courageous adults were now doing in the instructional pool: confront his fears by gripping the edge and kicking, placing his face in the water and making bubbles, and allowing his body to float while avoiding a panic attack.

Exactly why we don’t instinctively swim is a mystery. But as Daniel E. Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, explains, “It is possible that some of our ancestors swam or occasionally waded into marshes to collect sedges, but there is very little evidence that natural selection acted much on human abilities to swim.” He calls humans “slow, inefficient, and awkward as swimmers.”